I am weirded out and disgruntled and sad at my grandparents' situation and feel certain that everything will be mismanaged and fucked up.
So they have moved back and forth between their Tiny State beach house and their retirement complex Boca condo for what... since 1980. 25 years of retirement, I guess that's not bad. Every relative I have on my geneology on that side of the family dies either in Pr0vdence or in Boca which looks funny on paper sometimes.
But they are suddenly extremely decrepit and they didn't make it back up north this year and now they are talking about house-selling.
Hearing of this I felt instantly overwhelmed with horrid sadness. I thought of the way they carefully polish and maintain their Stuff. They have all this stuff that is so well maintained it's become beyond antiques and sort of into museum. The 1950s black granny-handlebar bikes every summer were taken out and wiped down and oiled so that they gleamed weirdly. But everything was like that and in fact seemed like that last year when I went back after many many years of not going. The smell of the workshop with all the tools and oil and everything carefully pegboarded up and full of memories of being made to participate in mysterious things like twisting the slidy metal handles of a vise grip while something else was being done or glued or sawed. My grandma also keeping everything so meticulous.
Now it's up there and they are sort of ghosts in the empty house. I mean they have half their stuff down in Boca I'm sure. But still, it seems like they must be haunted by the thought of all their carefully prized possessions now neglected and then lord knows what kind of ignoble feeding frenzy has already begun. I began fighting for them to not sell their house, not out of sentimental attachment to it as I prefer my other gp's house in Sombrero Shores in many ways and it is possible to scam a free stay at my late great-aunt gladiola's place there, but because it seems incredibly dumb to sell it when real estate is booming there and doesn't show any reason to slow down. And it is not that hard to rent it. So I put in my 2 cents and looked up the rental and property tax rates etc. I think this is my obnoxious knowitallness, but really... And yikes, is it really my ambition to be a remote slumlord? Even a beach slumlord who would be probably very kindly and rent to people with dogs and cats and babies and groups of students who would use it for a party house?
On the other hand they might need to sell it to pay for some kind of scary assisted living.
(And yet, how much better it would be and way less expensive if they lived in their retirement condo full of old people and just had a super visiting nurse type of person to drive them about and bring them to the store and hairdresser and check on them. Jeez. I don't have even a twinge of wishing for their $ to be preserved for my own sake as it's not like it comes to me if they die and it's not like there is much of it. But their house, sold, gives what... 5-7 years of assisted-living rent, maybe? and that is not counting if they have some medical emergency. I bet they have absolutely no advice or financial planning. Apparently a few years ago they had their box full of "valuable jewelry" in the car on their trip to Boca and it fell out of the car on one of their stops and it wasn't insured and they never reported it to anyone. Other side of the family is possibly worse. I on the other hand have glimmers of realizing, from watching the people around me who actually grew up with lots of money, that our family does everything with maximum financial stupidity and there are other ways.)
My Aunt Valium's evil motherfucker of a husband refuses to help her and her sisters buy it and, I hear, forbid her to manage it as a rental if someone else bought it. Because that's how evil he is AND MORE. He is so far beyond evil... that rat bastard...
But yeah the stuff. As for the feeding frenzy, I would like the unfinished novel that my grandma wrote in a little blank book when she was probably around 10 or 12. When I found it and read it and brought it to her and asked her about it, she ripped it from my hands in outrage and yelled at me in horror and a weird sense of ... shame? embarrassment? protectiveness and privacy? I know her baby sister died and it was a sentimental girls' novel about a girl whose baby sister is dying of consumption and they're all hungry and cold and poor and the heroine-girl is walking in the street and finds a silver dollar or something, like Sara Cr3we, and and spends it on roses for the baby who is lisping piteously for them, but when she gets home the baby is dead. "And she clasped the dear sweet babe's cold hands over the 'wed, wed woses' which -- alas! -- would never bloom again through the pale lilies in her cheeks..." It was really good and made me cry. I thought of it when I had a miscarriage and my sister in law sent me easter lilies, even though I had no babe whose hands to clasp over them and they made me have asthma anyway so I couldn't keep them but had to put them in the apartment lobby instead. I have wished many times since then that I had stolen the little book with the unfinished novel.
And with this house sale their death seems closer and more inevitable and it's very odd to think that most of their cherished objects will outlast them.
I suddenly understand vikings who heap up the possessions of the dead on giant blazing funereal ships.
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